a resto shaman and "her sisters and her cousins and her aunts"

meanwhile, outside of Azeroth…

Spinning off of the wildly successful NBI in May (which I didn’t manage to participate in), Ambermist has been providing monthly blogging challenges. This month, she says,

It’s nice to sometimes get a glimpse into the writer behind the blog, the person behind the character. So here’s your challenge: give me a detail about yourself.

I’d like to share with you a few of my other hobbies.

* When I was in high school, I paid the monthly Band dues (I played flute, and in my senior year, piccolo) by selling cinnamon rolls and sundry other baked goods. I baked 2-4 dozen cinnamon rolls almost every weekend for three years; then we moved and the band program in the high school I actually graduated from didn’t charge dues.
I paid tithing on my earnings, but I’ve never asked my parents if they reported it as self-employment income on their taxes during those years.
I can still make the dough completely from memory, but I do need to look up the recipe for the filling. I don’t bake very often anymore, however, because with only BTH and myself in the house, we frequently don’t manage to completely consume baked goods before they start to go bad.

* I taught myself to knit when I was in my early 20s. Most of the stuff I’ve made so far has been rectangular. Currently, however, I’m working on a baby cardigan for a niece who is not yet born.

* I learned to crochet from my maternal grandmother when I was in my late teens, and I only really know the one stitch that she taught me. Since then, I have made approximately three dozen afghans. I’ve given most of them away, primarily as wedding or first baby presents. I’ve kept seven: the first afghan I ever made, the afghan I made for my own wedding, two “scrap” afghans from my ever-growing stash of leftover yarns, and three geek-art projects.

This is the afghan I made for my wedding. Because it is 100% wool and my other projects have been cheap acrylic yarns, this is also the most expensive afghan I’ve ever made.

Each of the exactly 100 rows in this afghan represents 3 nanometers of the 400-700 nm wavelength “visible region” of the electromagnetic spectrum. The placement and hues of the colored lines correspond to the emission spectrum of hydrogen atoms.

The black, white, and two shades of grey — and the corresponding four shades of green — each represent one of the four standard nucleotide bases. Reading from the top of the afghan to the bottom, and using the one-letter codes for the standard amino acids, it translates to “AND THERE WAS LIFE”. Except that I discovered only after the project was finished that I’d made a mistake, and instead of saying “LIFE”, it says “LMFE.” Random mutations FTW!

The stripe pattern of this piece is based on the digits of pi. Someday I will make a counterpart piece, in cool tones, using the digits of e.

Where I am essentially monogamerous (when it comes to computer games), BTH is very polygamerous. He pretty much only logs into WoW to raid these days, and is thinking about letting his subscription lapse until Mists the next time it comes up for renewal. He’s been spending his computer time on Mount & Blade: Warband, Battle for Wesnoth, Bloons Tower Defense 5, and Magic: The Gathering – Online.

For a long time, BTH has dreamed of making a webcomic. He decided to use a play-by-post D&D game he participated in during the first year or so after we got married as the basis for his plot. For his last birthday, I gave him some drawing supplies and “how to draw” books. Then for our anniversary just now, I got us a Wacom Bamboo graphics tablet. I’ve wanted one of those things for years, and I hoped it would make BTH’s comic creation process easier, too. BTH produces a new page of his comic, Pharaoh, every week or two, and I think he does a very good job for having just recently started teaching himself how to draw! By this point, he probably knows more about digital coloring than I do, too. :D

:D
All three of those art afghans were made during graduate school. The Biochemistry department had a faculty & student art show every year, but I never quite managed to get my afghans into it. I like to use the hydrogen afghan as a visual when I’m teaching atomic spectra.

The pi afghan isn’t very big, though — it’s about the same size as one of my baby afghans. If and when I ever get around to making the other half and assembling the PI-E afghan, then it will be closer to a “full size” afghan.

I find casting on to be more difficult than casting off. Likewise, I think that decreasing is easier than increasing.

XD
I’d been thinking about making an “art afghan” for a year or so when while TAing General Chemistry, during the chapter on atomic structure, I suddenly realized that the atomic emission spectrum of hydrogen would be a *perfect* subject. To the scientifically naive, it would just look like a piece of minimalist abstract art, and for those with the right background, it would be a great art-meets-science piece. The other projects came later as I started to think about what other science topics would lend themselves well to an art form composed of stripes.

Well, actually, there are lots of things I *don’t* do… I’m terrible at cleaning house, I don’t “scrapbook” in any but the most minimalist, basic sense of the word, I don’t make fancy cards, I don’t run or do yoga, I’m not much of a photographer, I only know the most basic HTML and never got my head around CSS, and I don’t tolerate small children very well unless they are closely related to me or I have a longterm friendship with their parents or I have some sort of ecclesiastical stewardship over them (i.e., the Nursery calling I had in Nova Scotia and the 3 year old Primary class I teach now).